Family Tree

by Susan Wiggs

  “Okay,” the mom voice said, “how will we tell her everything? What if she asks for him? What do I say?”

  Him. Who was he? Someone who felt like a heavy sadness, pressing her down.

  “We’re going to take each moment as it comes. And of course, we’ll continue to monitor her constantly.”

  “Oh God. What if—”

  “Listen. And, Annie, if you can hear us, you listen, too. You’re young and strong and you survived the worst of it. We’re expecting you to make a good recovery.”

  I’m young, thought Annie. Well, duh.

  Then she wondered how old she was. Weird how she couldn’t remember . . . She could easily recall being just four or five, in the sugarhouse with Gran. See how it coats the spatula so perfectly? That means the sap has turned into syrup. We can use the thermometer, but we must use our eyes, too.

  Then she was ten, standing on the front porch of the farmhouse, watching her father leave in a storm of pink petals from the apple trees. The truck was crammed with moving boxes, and Dad walked with a stiff, resolute gait. Behind her, sobs drifted from the parlor, where Mom was curled up on the couch while Gran tried to soothe her.

  Annie’s world had cracked in two that day. She couldn’t put it back together because she didn’t understand how it had broken apart. There was a crack in her heart, too.

  “You should go, Caroline,” someone said. “Get some rest. This process—it can take days, maybe weeks. She’ll be monitored round the clock, and we’ll call you at the first sign of any change.”

  Hesitation. A soft sigh. “I see. So then, I’ll be back tomorrow,” said Mom. “In the meantime, call me if there’s any change at all. It doesn’t matter if it’s the middle of the night.”

  “Of course. Drive safely.”

  Footsteps fading away. Come back. The voice in her head was a man’s voice. She didn’t want to hear it. She tried to listen to the other people in the room.

  “. . . knew her in high school. She’s from that big family farm on Rush Mountain over in Switchback.” The voice was a gossipy chirp.

  “Wow, you’re right. I swam against her at State one year. Small world.”

  “Ay-up. She used to go around with Fletcher Wyndham. Remember him?”

  “Oh my gosh. Who doesn’t? She should have kept going.”

  Fletcher. Fletcher Wyndham. Annie’s mind kept circling back to the name until it matched an image she held in her heart. She remembered the sensation of love that filled every cell of her body, nourishing her like oxygen, warmed her through and through. Did she still love him? The voice had said she used to go around with him, so maybe the love was gone. How had she lost it? Why? What had happened? We’re not finished. She remembered him saying that to her. We’re not finished. But of course, they were.

  She remembered high school, and swimming and boys, and the most important person in her life—Fletcher Wyndham. There was college, and Fletcher again, and then there was a great cracking sound and he was gone.

  She felt herself sinking as sleep closed over her. A phantom warmth lay across her legs and turned the darkness to a dense orange color, as though a light shone from above. Trying to stay with her thoughts, she wandered in the wilderness, a dreamscape of disjointed images—laughter turning to sadness, a journey to a destination she didn’t recognize. After that, she sensed a long blank page with unrecognizable flickers around the edges.

  No, she didn’t know her age.

  She didn’t know anything. Only confusion, pain, breathing through water.

  Swimmers, take your marks.

  And Annie raced away.

  Music. Soundgarden? “The Day I Tried to Live.” And then Aerosmith. “Dream On.” Why? Mom and Dad used to dance to the oldies when they played on the radio. At sugar parties during the tapping and boiling, they’d boogie down while the boom box shook in the sugarhouse. Gran would make fried doughboys sprinkled with maple crystals, and people would come from all over to sample the wares.

  During the sugar season, there were parties every weekend on Rush Mountain. It was a time of hopeful transition, a sign that winter was finally yielding to sunny spring. The frozen nights, followed by warming days, caused a thaw, triggering a rush of sap during the daylight hours. The shifting season also brought on a rush of music, food, laughter, as the family hosted gatherings around the big steamy evaporator in the sugarhouse.

  Dad used to put a tent board sign out by the road: Sugar Rush—Warmest Place on the Mountain.

  More music drifted through the air—the Police. Hunters & Collectors. The B-52’s. Song after song took Annie back to her childhood. “Love Shack” was the most popular dance tune of them all. Only a few people knew that the nickname for the Rush sugarhouse was “the Love Shack.” Even fewer knew the reason for that.

  In the winter of her senior year of high school, Annie had lost her virginity in the sugarhouse, surrounded by maple-scented steam as she sweetly yielded to the soft kisses of a boy she thought would be hers forever.

  She’d never understood why people said “lost” her virginity. Annie had not lost a thing that night. She had given herself away—virginity, heart, self, soul. To the town bad boy, Fletcher Wyndham. So no, she hadn’t lost anything. She’d gained . . . something new and unexpected and achingly beautiful. The world had changed color for her that night, like the crowns of the maples at the first touch of autumn frost.

  He’s bad for you. Mom had been adamant about that.

  As if Annie’s mother had become some kind of relationship expert after Dad left.

  The space behind Annie’s eyes hurt. She squeezed her eyelids together. Blinked. Big mistake. She felt a sharp flash of light, straight to the brain. Ouch.

  The flashing made her curious, so she blinked some more despite the pain. Tried to rub her eyes, but her hands wouldn’t work. Then something brushed her face. Cold drops touched her eyes. She held them shut until the cold was gone. Her hands wanted to work, but something kept holding them back. Tied. Her hands were tied. Not figuratively, but literally. Some kind of padding prevented her from making a fist.

  More blinking, more shards of light. Ouch. She managed to keep her eyes open at a squint for a moment or two. She could move her eyes but not her head. Unfamiliar room. Plain beige walls. A grid of metal rails on the ceiling. For the camera mounts, right? She remembered an argument about the expense of the camera rails. Many arguments. Pain again. Not behind her eyes. Somewhere else. Run. Run away from the pain.

  She had to pee again.

  More looking. Blurry light from the rectangular opening overhead, the one that brought her to life when the warm glow passed over her. A skylight?

  She missed the sky.

  Eyes slitting open again in a squint. Yes, there was a skylight. Shifting her gaze, she saw a row of windows, too. Light from outside, filtered by gauzy drapes, streamed across the floor. Heat from an old-fashioned steam radiator created invisible eddies, wafting upward. Then her eyelids fell down, and she couldn’t lift them.

  Footsteps. Someone came in. Did . . . something. Moved a pillow. Did something lower down and she suddenly didn’t have to pee anymore.

  She tried to open her eyes, but they didn’t work. She had turned into a ghost again.

  The footsteps faded away.

  Come back.

  She concentrated on dragging her eyelids up, and this time her eyes stayed open. Confusion and sadness. Grief. Is this what grief was, this weight on her chest?

  She remembered the feeling from the day a member of the tree-tapping crew came into the farmhouse and told them about Gramps. He had gone out on a four-wheeler one afternoon to cut a tree, and was crushed when a tractor overturned on him. Years later, there was that bright sunshiny morning when Gran wouldn’t wake up.

  Yes, Annie knew grief. Closed her eyes, but the pain didn’t go away.

  She struggled again to lift her eyelids. Images pulsated before her eyes and then slowly resolved into focus. There was a generic quality to the sur
roundings. Impersonal art prints on the wall. A budget hotel, maybe?

  Her gaze moved from skylight to windowsill. Something new there—a display of knickknacks. And these were not impersonal at all. She was certain she recognized the items from long ago. Forever ago.

  Her tallest swim trophy, and a blue ribbon from the state-fair culinary-arts competition, 1998 Junior Chef Division. A copy of Gran’s cookbook, its worn and homey cover evoking waves of remembrance. She tried to grab on to the memories, but each one drifted off before it was fully formed, borne away on a wave of liquid pain.

  A boxy metallic container caught her eye. It was a half-gallon jug of Sugar Rush—the family’s maple syrup, produced on Rush Mountain since 1847. It said so right on the container, although she couldn’t make out the letters.

  Like all traditional syrup tins, Sugar Rush depicted a typical scene in the winter woods—a barn-red sugarhouse and a team of horses hauling the barrels of sap to be boiled. In the foreground were two fresh-faced kids in hand-knit hats and mittens, riding a toboggan down a snow-covered slope.

  What most people didn’t know was that the quaint building was the actual one on Rush Mountain. The kids were Annie and her brother, Kyle. Their mom, with her singular artistic talent, had rendered the drawing from old photographs.

  Kyle had hired a brand consultant to offer ways to increase sales, and one suggestion had been to redesign the old-fashioned package. Kyle had refused to consider it. “People don’t want the things they love to change,” he said.

  Remembering her brother’s words, Annie felt something even more powerful than the watery pain in her head. Yet she couldn’t name the feeling. It caused an ache in her throat.

  She listened to the soft hiss and thump some more. A percussion section warming up. Every once in a while, a quiet tone sounded. Not a beep but a tone. A tuning fork?

  The sky within the skylight was impossibly blue, the kind of blue that made a person’s eyes smart. What was this place? Where in the world was she?

  “Hey,” she said. Her voice was a broken noise, like an old-fashioned scratched vinyl record. Dad had taken the record collection when he left. “Hey.”

  The thing around her neck confined her, and she couldn’t lift or turn her head. Her ankles and wrists felt bound by fleecy cuffs like unwanted sex toys. No, thank you.

  She managed to move her left hand a little, angling it into view. The stiff thing holding her fingers straight was gone now. Was this her hand? It was a stranger’s hand. The nails were cut short and unpolished. Which made no sense, because she’d just had a manicure the day before. She’d wanted to look professional for the People interview.

  She touched her thumb to her ring finger. There was no ring.

  A memory flickered. A home. A job. A life.

  The grief came rolling back. Whoosh, like runoff in the springtime flumes through the maple groves. And just like that, the memories were swept away once again, no more real than a dream.

  Footsteps again. More rushing around. Squishy rubber soles squeaked on linoleum as people came and went. Annie blinked, glimpsing a woman in cotton scrubs printed with kittens and stars. She bent forward, her breath warm and smelling of spearmint. “Annie. Hey, Annie? Can you hear me?”

  “Uh.” Broken voice again, noise coming in a toneless rasp. “Huh.”

  The woman’s face blazed with a smile. “Welcome back,” she said.

  The sound of paper tearing, as if ripped off a roll of gift wrap. Footsteps again, hurrying off on a mission, then fading. Running. Running away.

  Come back.

  The woman spoke again, but not to Annie, to someone over her shoulder.

  “Call the family—stat.”

  4

  Caroline Rush removed the two coordinated art prints from the wall of Annie’s room at the rehab center, and replaced the discount-store artwork with a pair of original paintings of her own. If—no, when—her daughter woke up again, Caroline wanted her to see something familiar on the wall. She still couldn’t get over the feeling of wonder and gratitude she’d felt when they’d called. Annie woke up. She spoke.

  But by the time Caroline had sped down the mountain and along the state highway to Burlington, Annie was asleep again.

  “You picked two of my favorites,” said a voice Caroline hadn’t heard in years.

  She froze. Stopped breathing. Closed her eyes. And then she rallied, inhaling deeply. She would not let this man take her breath away. She would not let him render her at a loss for words. Very slowly, she turned.

  Her ex-husband walked through the door. Ethan was as lean and fit as the day she’d met him—a young man driving a truckload of fresh produce. “Hey, Caro. I got here as quickly as I could.” He brushed past her and went straight to Annie’s bedside. “What’s happening?”

  “They say she’s in transition.”

  Ethan gazed down at their daughter, and his face went soft with sadness. He touched her bony shoulder through the faded hospital drape. “What’s that supposed to mean—in transition?”

  “That’s a question for the doctor. All I know is what I e-mailed Kyle. I assume he forwarded it to you.”

  “Yeah. So she’s finally waking up? Coming around?”

  Caroline’s stomach pounded with dread for her daughter, a feeling with which she was intimately familiar these days. “There’ve been signs . . .”

  He pinched the bridge of his nose, his face taut with emotion.

  Years after the divorce, Caroline still had no idea how to act around her ex-husband. Since he had left on that glorious pink-and-blue spring day, she’d only seen him a few times. Ethan had attended Kyle’s wedding to Beth, a small and intimate celebration at the Grange Hall in Switchback. It had been awful, because Ethan had brought Imelda with him.

  Caroline had actively hated him in that moment, and then she’d hated herself for letting her ex steal her joy on their son’s wedding day. She did better at Annie’s wedding, several years later. By then, she’d learned to put up an impermeable wall between herself and Ethan. She pretended her ex-husband was just someone she used to know, like the guy who came to root out the septic system once a year.

  “I didn’t realize you had a favorite,” she said now, stepping back to make sure the paintings were level.

  “There’s a lot you didn’t know about me,” he said.

  She swung around to face him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “The right corner needs to come up a tad,” he said, indicating toward one of the pictures.

  “No, it’s perfect.” She took another step back, and saw that he was right. She reached forward and nudged the corner up.

  She wondered why he’d said this particular painting was one of his favorites. It was a landscape of Rush Mountain, the view looking westward at sunset in early autumn. The sky had a special radiance at that time of year, touching the meadows and treetops with fire and lengthening the shadows in the valley leading downward to the town of Switchback. She had caught the light just so, managing to convey its fleeting nature.

  Ethan had never liked the place, even though it had been their home for eighteen years. After they married and she got pregnant so quickly with Kyle, Ethan had stayed out of obligation. He’d left as soon as their son was old enough to take over the farm.

  “Why is it your favorite?” she asked without looking at him.

  “Because your heart’s in it,” he said, simply and unexpectedly. “And because Annie always loved the view from your studio.”

  Caroline couldn’t argue with that. She had done a similar canvas for Annie as a wedding gift.

  Their daughter had been breathtaking on her wedding day. All brides were. But Annie was the kind of beautiful that cut like a knife, imparting a sweet pain that made Caroline clasp her hands together in a stranglehold. She hadn’t bothered to hold back her tears as Annie appeared on the secluded, rock-bound California beach at sunset. The setting was so different from Vermont, like another country. Another planet.
Yet Annie’s expression, so full of hope, had been the same expression she’d worn every Christmas morning when she was little.

  Why did joy bring the same tears as sadness? Why did the throat and chest ache with fire, regardless? Was it because, deep down, everyone knew it was fragile and ephemeral? Did the tears come from the knowledge that everything could turn in the blink of an eye?

  Caroline knew that happiness could be destroyed in the time it took a tractor to overturn in a ditch. The time it took for a husband to say, “I’m leaving.”

  The time it took for a piece of equipment to drop on a young woman’s head.

  She looked over at the bed. Ethan sat quietly beside Annie, gazing into her unmoving face the way Caroline had done for so many hours. As if he felt Caroline watching him, he turned on the rolling stool. “What time will the doctor come?”

  “They never give you a specific time,” she said. The silence between them felt awkward, so she switched on the music, a playlist she’d made of songs she thought Annie would like. “How Do You Talk to an Angel” came through the speaker—an unfortunate selection, because it triggered a memory of Ethan, lip-synching the song as he acted it out with exaggerated gestures to make his little daughter laugh.

  Did Ethan remember those moments? Did certain songs give rise to indelible memories within him? Did he ever think about the lost sweetness of their family life? Or did he only recall the stale discontent, the yearning for something different?

  “Where are you staying?” she asked him, deciding it was best to stick with neutral topics. She didn’t want to know anything personal about him. She didn’t want him to know anything about her life. Yet when he looked at her even now, he seemed to know everything about her.

  “Hotel across the way—it’s a Best Western, I think. Next week, I’ll move to my folks’ place up in Milton.”

  “Kyle said your dad has finally decided to retire,” she said.

  “That’s right. He’s looking for a buyer for the business.”